Liberation Jubilation

Early Monday morning, iFixit team members came into work excited and a little bit nervous. The unexpected, albeit awesome, community reaction to Liberation Week was the buzz around the water cooler (which we assembled from a dozen old Folger’s cans and a roll of duct tape).

On the first morning—nay, the first 16 minutes—of our scheduled week-long celebration, we completely sold out of the 3,552 iPhone Liberation Kits on offer for free. Minds blown. When we said we wanted to liberate the world’s iPhone owners, we had no idea our freedom fighters would become an army.

We couldn’t let being “sold out” stop forward progress. We didn’t want to turn down the people who didn’t make the initial cutoff. So, we scrounged up every last Phillips screw we could find, and dropped the price of our entire stock of iPhone Liberation Kits to free (+ shipping).

In the end, we gave away tools to over 9,000 freedom fighters across 68 countries (the United States, Germany, Italy, Romania, Ireland, and Norway, just to name a few). The kits are shipping now. We promise—we’re flogging the shipping monkeys and they’re packing kits as fast as their little paws can go. Yes, they might be faster with opposable thumbs. But we don’t have that kind of budget.

Soon, 14,903 iPhones will be liberated.

Repair is a movement. And right now it’s spreading.

We hope that, when you get to open up your new kit, you get the same sense of liberation as we did. Because if you can’t fix it, you don’t own it—but that’s not a problem for you and your iPhone anymore.